Modern Saints

 Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

 where there is injury,pardon; where there is doubt, faith;

 where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

 to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

 and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.  St. Frances

Father, through your son, reveal to me the ways of your Love..... My second prayer is to ask our Father to reveal the ways of his peace....Priest who aided lepers in Hawaii to become saint

VATICAN CITY (AP) — A 19th-century Belgian priest who ministered to leprosy patients in Hawaii will be declared a saint Oct. 11 at a Vatican ceremony presided over by Pope Benedict XVI.

The Rev. Damien de Veuster's canonization date was set Saturday during a meeting between Benedict and cardinals at the Apostolic Palace.

De Veuster will be canonized along with three other people, the Vatican said.

In July, Benedict approved a miracle attributed to the priest's intercession, declaring that a Honolulu woman's recovery in 1999 from terminal lung cancer was the miracle needed for him to be made a saint.

He was beatified — a step toward sainthood — in 1995 by Pope John Paul II.

Born Joseph de Veuster in 1840, he took the name Damien and went to Hawaii in 1864 to join other missionaries of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Nine years later he began ministering to leprosy patients on the remote Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokai island, where some 8,000 people had been banished amid an epidemic in Hawaii in the 1850s.

The priest eventually contracted the disease, also known as Hansen's disease, and died in 1889 at age 49.

The Vatican's saint-making procedures require that a miracle attributed to the candidate's intercession be confirmed in order for him or her to be beatified. Damien de Veuster was beatified after the Vatican declared that the 1987 recovery of a nun of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary was a miracle. The nun recovered from an illness after praying to Damien.

After beatification, a second miracle is needed for sainthood.

The Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints said Audrey Toguchi's 1999 recovery from lung cancer defied medical explanation, and in July, Benedict agreed. Toguchi, too, had prayed to Damien.

Song of Bernadette Lyrics:

(Bernadette Soubirous is the saint of Lourdes, France. Visionary and messenger of the Immaculate Conception.)

 
There was a child named Bernadette. I heard the story long ago. She saw the queen of heaven once and kept the vision in her soul.

No one beleived what she had seen. No one beleived what she heard, that there were sorrows to be healed and mercy, mercy in this world.

So many hearts I find broke like yours and mine, torn by what we've done and can't undo. I just wanna hold you. Come on, let me hold you like Bernadette would do.


We've been around, we fall, we fly. We mostly fall, we mostly run. And every now and then we try to mend the damage that we've done.

Tonight, tonight I just can't rest. I've got this joy here, here inside my breast. To think that I did not forget that child, that song of Bernadette.

So many hearts I find, hearts like yours and mine, torn by what we've done and can't undo. Well, I just wanna hold you. Come on, let me hold you like Bernadette would do.

I just wanna hold you. Won't you let me hold you like Bernadette would do?

The Miracle of the Sun is an alleged miraculous event witnessed by as many as 100,000 people on 13 October 1917 in the Cova da Iria fields near Fátima, Portugal. Those in attendance had assembled to observe what the Portuguese secular newspapers had been ridiculing for months as the absurd claim of three shepherd children that a miracle was going to occur at high-noon in the Cova da Iria on October 13, 1917.

According to many witness statements, after a downfall of rain, the dark clouds broke and the sun appeared as an opaque, spinning disk in the sky.It was said to be significantly less bright than normal, and cast multicolored lights across the landscape, the shadows on the landscape, the people, and the surrounding clouds. The sun was then reported to have careened towards the earth in a zigzag pattern, frightening some of those present who thought it meant the end of the world.Some witnesses reported that their previously wet clothes became "suddenly and completely dry."

Estimates of the number of witnesses range from 30,000-40,000 by Avelino de Almeida, writing for the Portuguese newspaper O Século, to 100,000, estimated by Dr. Joseph Garrett, professor of natural sciences at the University of Coimbra,both of whom were present that day.

The miracle was attributed by believers to Our Lady of Fátima, an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to three young shepherd children in 1917, as having been predicted by the three children on 13 July, 19 August, and 13 September 1917. The children reported that the Lady had promised them that she would on 13 October reveal her identity to them and provide a miracle "so that all may believe.